More on my fiction writing

September 26, 2010

Blue highways

Having business in Phoenix that I was in no hurry to begin, we took the back roads from Seattle. My preference is to take the train, but a funding-starved Amtrak doesn't even go to the nation's fifth most populous city (and Amtrak will probably be killed by the Republicans, should they gain control of Congress). The drive might recall the days when motoring was pleasant, synonymous with freedom in a big country. It might reveal the West as it was when I was younger, before the millions of newcomers, exurban sprawl and Interstate sameness.

Considering timing and the route I wanted, the Interstate couldn't be avoided from Seattle to the Oregon border. Even so, it was showcased the variety of Washington state, particularly the bountiful farmland east of the Cascades and running down to Yakima and Walla Walla. The contrast with Arizona, which is all about attracting new house buyers, could not have been more striking. But the true drive began where U.S. 395 hits Pendleton, Oregon, just below the storied Columbia River.

Pendleton is the kind of real small town that has been largely lost in America, leaving either wealthy yupped-up towns that are imitations of small towns, or, more frequently, places hollowed out by Wal-Mart and de-industrialization, leaving ghost Main Streets and grotesque boxes of fast food and Wally hulking out "by the highway." Downtown Pendleton is blessed with real local shops such as an office supply store (!) that actually serve local customers, as well as a mission for the needy, government buildings, offices, churches, restaurants. They occupy a century's worth of architure, but most of it pleasingly historic and densely close together. Real neighborhoods are nearby. The Union Pacific main line to Portland goes through the heart of town -- it serves the agricultural economy, and once had passenger trains before one of many Amtrak cutbacks. Taken together, the downtown is a delight of scale, walkability and beauty.

Pendleton holds a big rodeo in September. My wonder at the intact, busy downtown was met by residents with a worried response. Many of these businesses are suffering and might go down. The big hope is from tourists that would come for the Round-Up. Of course, no such worry intrudes on the Wal-Mart and chain eateries and motels out on the Interstate. I wondered for the millionth time why the lovely, the historic, the authentic and the unique were always at risk in America.

Highway 395 loops around grassy hills, up and down pine-covered summits and through lots of nothing as it pushes into Oregon. Vistas offered nothing made by man but the road; one resembled that Prescott Valley once looked like, believe it or not. It is indeed the West as I remembered it. We drove hours and saw one or two cars. Passed through crossroads with gas stations or general stores that had been shuttered for decades. Just when I had grown accustomed to the rhythm of the terrain, the highway suddenly, frighteningly ran right up to the edge of Lake Abert, a huge drop down and no guard rails, then skirted it for miles. To the east, a stark mesa rises up, holding you fast against between the water and the fault scarp that thrusts 2,500 feet from the valley floor. The emptiness is arresting, stunning, magnificent and a bit discomforting.

People are close to the land in a way that has been lost in most of America. At one point, we were stopped by a small cattle drive down the highway. This was not for the tourists, for none were around. The towns now were far from the Interstate, far, really, from many of the changes of recent decades. I had no doubt that most residents trended Republican and would have welcomed a Wal-Mart or a McDonald's. The local restaurants and stores simply are. Issues of a local economy, sustainability and the toxicity of corporate sameness wouldn't be a big draw at the bars in Lakeview, Ore., and Alturas, Calif. In Oregon, a turn to the west would have taken us to Bend, probably the worst speculative real-estate disaster in the Northwest, where developers tried to create a golf-and-resort nirvana and then the economy collapsed. But on 395, you'd never know any of this had happened. Through Oregon and California, the highway serves places that do real things, such as farming and ranching. They have missed the big money -- and the big collapse. It's hard not to come away wondering if the ugliness and gaudiness of recent years went hand-in-hand with our illusion of prosperity, which was really debt and speculation that couldn't last.

This sense is powerfully reinforced when we enter Nevada. For much of the 2000s, it was "the fastest growing state in the nation" and the epicenter of the big bubble. The haunting beauty of the West is replaced by wall-to-wall disfigurement: shopping strips, fast food, subdivisions, apartments, car dealerships, big boxes, and all as separate and spread out as possible. This is poignant for northwest Nevada, a place I knew from the mid-1970s as a sweet, historic setting with spectacular scenery and compact towns. In Reno, downtown has been savaged by large casinos build on te edge of the city. The grasslands south have been ploughed over for subdivisions. The once-ethereal Washoe Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada (you can see it as it was in the picnic scene of The Shootist) has been desecrated by the house builders and a freeway running to Carson City. The once-charming state capital now looks like Crapville, America. Its growth rate has been around 5 percent to the 32-percent rate of the state. No matter. The sagebrush has been swept aside for all manner of sprawl and now much of it is rotting and in foreclosure.

This raises hard-headed economic questions, such as: Who would finance all these swindles? But another, more important one is, What kind of people would care so little for the beauty and majesty of the land as to allow this?

Another two-land highway took us the long way through the bleak, mysterious desert to the urban abortion that is Vegas. We crossed Hoover Dam for the last time and the question came back forcefully. The great dam fits surprisingly well with its surroundings, while also presenting inspiring Art Deco touches at the human scale. The new bridge that will fly overhead is just another piece of America freeway design, circa 1960. It's intrusive and homely. Does our society have nothing new to offer? What a jarring and disheartening contrast to Hoover Dam, which was completed in the depth of the Depression but spoke of American can-do and American civilization. A Hoover Dam for our age would have been a high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Phoenix, but no. America can't do.

Kingman is similarly depressing. The downtown on Route 66 and the Santa Fe mainline rots in the sun while exurban roads hold all the shopping, restaurants and even the library. Enjoy all this when gasoline is $10-a-gallon. From there, it's much the same all the way to Phoenix. At the Nevada state line, we entered another country. But this one was certainly using plenty of stimulus money to pave and widen its roads, even as its "patriots" decried the "socialist" Obama. It made me wish I could have lingered on the blue highway 700 miles back.

Good piece, Jon. Nothing better than driving the back roads and visiting towns that feature block buildings built with hewn granite. Much of the West I appreciate most is desolate and mercifully unfit for subdivisions. I had the good fortune recently to drive from Salt Lake to Ely, Nev., and I took the southern two-lane route through the Great Basin. I swear there were vultures circling above my solitary auto. The mountain ranges in eastern Nevada are astonishingly massive, rugged, beautiful -- and deserted.

I took much of Talton's route back to Arizona in July. Lakeview stood out as an extremely isolated place and was lovely for that reason. As horrifying as Reno and Vegas are, Nevada remains a sad reminder how even greed once had dignity. Tonopah and Goldfield teeter on the edge of oblivion but without the methy frenzy that characterizes so much of America.

Kingman may be the most disheartening place in America. I wonder if Mohave County generally isn't the future for a nation increasingly tribalized and broken. The Tea Party's agenda - old whine in a new bottle - looks like it was born here.

Good news, such as it is: the new economic landscape means far less exurban development. And future energy shortages mean less aimless travel through the spectral remains of America's better days. We can marvel at the mystery of time without assuming there is a moral purpose to our speculations. We live, we die, and something different is born in the crevice of old facts.

Much of downtown Pendleton's commercial real estate stands empty, not to mention gutted by fire damage. As with most of rural Oregon, the anti-business policies of state government have destroyed our economy here in Umatilla County.

Also, please recall that Democrats were responsible for the freeways Jon hates so much, chief among them Prince Albert Gore's dad. Ike said he would never have approved the Interstate Highway bill had he known the autobahns would go into cities.

Further, very few Obamabucks actually went for infrastructure, as Jon supposes. A better stimulus bill than the Porkulus monstrosity would have included more for construction, such as being discussed now. But better still would have been tax cuts, the only kind of stimulus that can produce sustainable jobs, & pay for itself through the taxpaying jobs created when business can hire & buy new equipment or expand.

The REAL problem is OUTSOURCING. The US has lost too many jobs. We have millions of workers for whom we have no jobs. The result is poverty and ruin.

The "good" areas Jon saw were areas where the economic backbone was not ripped out. The "bad" areas are the evidence of the debt and speculation that were offered as terrible substitutes for real jobs and a real economy.

The United States has one real problem. It is the JOBS CRISIS. We need 30 million good-paying jobs this instant. Give us those and everything else will play out decently. Without the jobs, every problem that Jon writes about will just magnify.

"What kind of people would care so little for the beauty and majesty of the land as to allow this?"

Now that's what I call a loaded rhetorical question. And I can't resist playing with a loaded querry. So here's the first few paragraphs from a recent AZ Daily Star article:

"Dorothy Ross often journeys to this wooded area in the Tonto National Forest to pray, harvest acorns and pick medicinal plants. She's made the trip since she was a child.

Assembled at the Oak Flat Campground, east of Superior, Ross and other elders of the San Carlos Apache Tribe said this area of the Pinal Mountains is sacred. God created their people at this site and gave them the land, they said.

Speaking collectively in their native language through an interpreter, Ross, Delores Jordan, Gertrude Waterman and Audrey Johnson said spirits living in the crevices and canyons provide blessings to the Apaches.

Tribal leaders traditionally have preferred to have healing ceremonies and purification rituals here.

"God created this area for us," the interpreter said, distilling the thoughts of the four women. "Since the beginning of time, this area was never restricted to us."

But the area also holds what's been called the largest untapped reserve of copper in the U.S. and possibly in the world. In a plan that includes the wider Oak Flat area, Resolution Copper Co., a joint venture of Anglo-Australian mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, wants to mine a deposit that's more than a mile below the surface."

I think we've seen this movie before.
Nevertheless here is the rest of the script:

There he is! The Rogue returned! Welcome back. I don't know if it's a brain-fart or not, but as soon as I saw your new post I had a weird notion to write a comment saying "Got your nose!" as in the old children's game.
(As Sean Lennon sings, "my motorcycle brain / remains to be explained" -- which I interpret in light of the book title Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)

"But better still would have been tax cuts, the only kind of stimulus that can produce sustainable jobs, & pay for itself through the taxpaying jobs created when business can hire & buy new equipment or expand."

So, explain to me how tax cuts could stimulate anything except speculation bidding up the price of paper wealth?

Businesses don't expand or hire merely because they have extra money: they do so because there is sufficient demand for the products or services they sell to make expansion profitable and worthwhile.

A recent article in the Arizona Republic noted that "91 percent of small-business owners surveyed in August by the National Federation of Independent Business said all their credit needs were met and that "only 4 percent cited a lack of financing as their top business problem" while pointing out that "plans for capital spending were at a 35-year low".

So it isn't a lack of available funding, it's a lack of demand. You can't spur demand by cutting the taxes of the rich (who, by and large, already spend as much of their income on consumption as they're going to, investing the rest in paper assets to increase their wealth). That includes successful small-business owners.

One of the few things that can possibly increase demand to levels sufficient to restore the country to the kind of high-growth necessary to decrease unemployment to acceptable levels -- any time soon that is -- is not tax cuts, but direct redistribution of income, funded via targeted tax *increases* of the wealthy.

Terry Dudas, your cryptic utterances become more and more unintelligible. Who's Zero? Who's a Marxist?

I'm a non-Marxist socialist. For that matter, did you know that the Nixon administration gave serious consideration to a national minimum income? Was Nixon a Marxist? (Well, he DID go to China...maybe them heathen Chinee brainwashed him while he was there.)

See, socialism means public ownership of the means of production. Redistribution of income is something else entirely, and it goes on in every developed country on the planet. It's just a question of how much, and what it goes for.

I'm proposing to cut out the middleman (bureaucracy) and let individual recipients decide what to spend redistributed money on. That maintains the classical feedback links of capitalism, allowing for resources to be allocated more rationally.

This country would become an economic powerhouse if the excess income of the wealthy were directly redistributed to the bottom third of the working population. There's a lot of unfulfilled consumer demand in the latter group.

With a steady, reliable stream of increased demand, businesses receiving that money would expand operations and hire, and banks would be happy to deem them a good risk for business loans.

Unemployment would plummet to near zero. Everybody would want a job so that they could get their share of redistributed income. We could do away with a number of social programs catering to the impoverished, because everyone who worked would get a living income, and demand would be sufficient to make full employment profitable.

P.S. Yes, this country needs infrastructure investment badly. I propose to fund that with a tax on financial transactions (excluding credit card purchases). Just two-tenths of one percent of each transaction value would yield, by conservative estimates, $2 trillion over ten years.

Thanks for that idea, azrebel. Now you've inspired me to compile a speculative list (others may join in) of possible references:

(1) The 1973 Schoolhouse Rock song "My Hero, Zero"

"My hero, Zero, such a funny little hero,
But till you came along,
We counted on our fingers and toes.
Now you're here to stay
And nobody really knows
How wonderful you are.
Why we could never reach a star,
Without you, Zero, my hero,
How wonderful you are."

(2) The 1974 Billy Preston song "Nothing from Nothing":

"Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me

I'm not tryin' to be your hero
'Cause that zero is too cold for me, Brrr
I'm not tryin' to be your highness
'Cause that minus is too low to see, yeah"

(3) The 1983 song "Saved by Zero" by The Fixx:

"Maybe, someday
Saved by zero
I’ll be more together
Stretched by fewer
Thoughts that leave me
Chasing after
My dreams disown me

"A Hoover Dam for our age would have been a high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Phoenix" - Rogue

Are you proposing a "bridge to nowhere" redux? Connecting two unsustainable dead-ends does not a sustainable future make. I can think of myriad better places to connect, other than two sprawling salvage yards posing ephemerally as desert mirages.

It matters little how quickly the retirees and jobless of Phoenix can be shuttled to Nevada's casinos to surrender the remnants of their savings.

Tax cuts are not the answer as 1) the rich aren't really spending (also our billion boss did get a new Bentley convertible) as they chase better interest rates overseas; and 2) all that extra corporate cash and low interest is going into our next round of mergers (its good to be Goldman Sachs).